Calling ALL Labourers! (11.A)

 

I have never been happier being a priest than I am right now. Not on my ordination day, not as I said my first Mass.

Leaving Christ the Redeemer may be the hardest thing I have ever done, but it’s let me see the fruit of my labours in a way I never expected. Hearing people talk about my ministry here is the closest thing to attending my own funeral.

So, it would be easy to focus this homily on the need for priests. After all, the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel were part of the prayer for vocations we used for many decades in this Archdiocese: “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.”

And what better time to ask you to pray for priestly vocations than now, when the joys of priesthood are almost overwhelming me?

But it’s not where the Holy Spirit directed me this weekend.

God’s words from the first reading are what landed on my heart: “you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” He is speaking not to the ordained, but to every single one of us.

This divine call is echoed clearly in the New Testament, where St. Peter writes “like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ" (1 Pt 2:5).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it simply: “Baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers” (n. 1268).

But despite such rock-solid foundations, we’re slow to accept the idea of the baptismal or common priesthood. We’ve tended to focus on the gift of the ordained or ministerial priesthood, while our Protestant brothers and sisters have emphasized the priesthood of all believers. Happily, the tide is turning.

The words of a noted Protestant theologian apply completely to our Catholic Church: “ The priesthood of all believers is a call to ministry and service; it is a barometer of the quality of the life of God’s people in the body of Christ and of the coherence of our witness in the world, the world for which Christ died.”

I’m struck by that word ‘coherence.’ I even looked it up to understand it better. Coherence is “the quality of being logical and consistent.” It’s when “the parts of something fit together in a natural or reasonable way.”

Is it logical when the work of an organization is carried on only by its leaders and not by its members? Is it consistent when ordained ministers are the only ones proclaiming good news to the world?

Is it natural or reasonable that the world’s 407,872 priests try to evangelize or re-evangelize the world’s eight billion people? That’s about two million people per priest.

But there are about 1.3 billion baptized Catholics in the world—more than one for every eight people on the planet.

The math is obvious.

But it’s not only about numbers. When we become convinced of our call to be labourers in the Lord’s harvest, we experience a new level of Christian joy, of satisfaction with our faith.

Working alongside one another in the Lord’s field or vineyard, we discover what the Christian life can be. Before I came to Christ the Redeemer, I was a happy and productive priest. I had assumed I would do good work in the Archdiocese, using my canon law training to help the Church. I was like a happy middle-aged bachelor who was no longer thinking of getting married and starting a family.

And then, like one of those men who marries late and discovers that fatherhood was what he was really made for all along, I became a pastor, a shepherd, and indeed a father.

A similar joyful discovery is available to every single Christian ready to sign up as a labourer—a priestly labourer—leaving the sidelines or what Pierre Berton called the comfortable pew.

We saw it yesterday as more than a hundred people were prayed over for the baptism in the Holy Spirit, each of them ready for whatever God had in store for them. I am still processing the power and wonder of it all, but I suspect it may have been the spiritual high point of my years in the parish.

Here’s something interesting: there were about a dozen three-person teams praying over individuals. Thirty-six or so Catholics asking the Holy Spirit to fill the hearts of those who came forward for prayer. One of those 36 was a priest—me. (Father Zidago was in the confessional.) The other 35 were exercising their baptismal priesthood in a non-sacramental ministry of prayer and intercession.

Simply unimaginable before the New Pentecost that St. John XXIII prayed for in 1962.

To return to the image I quoted earlier, the barometer is rising, and rising fast, at Christ the Redeemer parish.

In closing, we can’t forget that we are a priestly people, a priestly kingdom, in a very particular way when we gather for the Eucharist. The ordained priest has a unique role in the Mass, but every one of us is also exercising a share in Christ’s priesthood as we gather at the altar.

Words from St. Leo the Great can serve as my summary today: “What is as priestly as to dedicate a pure conscience to the Lord and to offer the spotless offerings of devotion on the altar of the heart?”